 Okay, we're back live inside theCUBE. This is SiliconAngle.tv's extensive coverage of IBM Edge 2012, IBM's on the ground here in Orlando. They have IBM Innovate going right across the street here and also IBM Storage Technology Innovation Conference, the Edge 2012. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconAngle.com. This is theCUBE, our flagship telecast. We go out to the events, extract the signal from the noise, share that with you and get all the smartest guys in the room to come on. Smartest guys and gals. We've had some great guests here from IBM and some of their customers. So again, I'm John Furrier, I'm joined by my co-host. I'm Dave Vellante of wikibon.org and yes John, we had the big data gal on before and he was very impressive. And now we're here with good friend Ed Walsh. Ed runs the storage portfolio strategy for IBM. Ed, welcome again inside theCUBE. Keep alumni, welcome back. So, alumni is going to be back. So Edge is a nice event, a very high quality, great attendance, better than expected attendance. Sold out, sold out. I think originally you guys were expecting 1,500, I think 1,900 or so registered. So I would expect you got north of 1,500 that showed up. I mean, I'm impressed by IBM in general as a company. Dave and I are talking about the performance of the company overall. They're actually in market places. Nothing to shake a stick at, they're doing very, very well. But as a technology company and services, they got everything end to end. However, it's kind of all over the place. You got this guy sell this and this from division, but you stack up IBM's assets, they got everything there. And everyone's racing to get solutions out in the market with big data in clouds, a lot of momentum. Converge infrastructure, we were talking earlier, it's half a trillion dollar business opportunity in the marketplace, converge infrastructure, two thirds of the enterprises are moving. So the question that I want to talk to you about is storage is strategic. We've talked about this on theCUBE before. It's an element that has a lot of enablement around it. And not everyone has all the picture, the pieces of the picture. You guys have that coming together. You've introduced this portfolio concepts, which is essentially packaging up, not just storage speeds and feeds and all the greatness of the performance you guys need to do, but other elements. So talk about this event, storage innovation, expanding your storage leadership and how that translates to the portfolio and what is the portfolio? So good questions. And I think you're right. It's almost, if you look at our portfolio, it's truly the most complete portfolio in storage, but also if you look wider as far as the solutions need, either big data or analytics or cloud, it's the most complete portfolio in the industry. But the challenge is, how do you bring that in form of a client in an organized way because the size and the scale to be honest of IBM. But if you're going to come to one person, come into IBM, you can get the whole solution set. So what Edge is all about is our premiere storage event. Yes, it's focused more on storage, but really how it interplays with both analytics, building out clouds, as well as also big data. And what you have to do is we're working on way to just communicate what is our portfolio, whether the key areas that we're investing on and what you can take out of that portfolio. You guys are obviously investing. So talk about what's happening internally. I mean, how does this all work and all the groups, are they kind of working together? Who's Maestro in here? Is it the storage group? Is it the software all the above? How does that work internally? Well, so we have a very good coordination actually driven by Jenny, the CEO, to do cross IBM plays. And it's not to do bundling, but it's actually to have coordination. So imagine what we could do around analytics and big data with our investment software on so much analytics and big data. Imagine what we could do in cloud when you look at all of stuff we do for GTS, what we do internally, what we do intimately and bring that together. So we're doing these cross IBM plays, and that's driven directly from the top from Jenny. So if we talk about individual initiatives, I'll tell you where we're again, cross IBM bring it to there. And what you're seeing today is we're talking about smarter storage, which really plays upon our overall message of smarter planet, which you need smarter computing and how smarter storage plays into it. And really show people how they can use a portfolio to help out in situations like analytics, big data, cloud. So smarter storage, great tagline. Sort of what's the product example in the portfolio that supports that? So if you look at smarter storage, it has some key tenants if you would. So it was launched today. So it's a, you know, smarter storage is efficient by design, smarter storage is self-optimizing, and smarter storage is cloud agile. And what you mean by that, those are the key things we're investing across the portfolio. So a good example is like, okay, so cloud, you're going to build a private cloud. Where does that come together for clients? Well, it needs to have all those components. So a really good example would be our Pureflex offering, which is our consolidating infrastructure, both systems, network, management, and storage, and smarter storage is part of that overall offering. So it's a classic private cloud 2.0, and where it's differentiated compared to anyone else in the industry, it's really, to do that right, it's actually hard. And everyone else took a shortcut. So what the clients were asking for in private cloud is, hey, help me get, you know, control over my environment. Let me consolidate my environment and get control over it. So I get elasticity and, you know, some efficiency. And what the industry provided them was kind of like 1.0, which was, well, I'll give you, and it ended up being a VMware only type of consolidation play led by EMC with VBlock and Cisco, et cetera. Well, IBM did, which by the way, was a lot of hard work, but really answered the question. It's a smarter answer, which is, no, no, you want to consolidate your environment. And what we do with the PureFlex initiative is allow you to bring in your environment, which is not just VMware. In fact, you might want multiple virtualization engines, but one interface, but physical environments, also Intel, but also some risk architectures like P-Series, and bring that together. Now that's what people were looking for, and that was a big announcement we had in April. Another good example of cross IBM. So that is a system of storage, a network, and a management coming together to provide the industry something that you can't get anywhere else. So I infer from that, you've been working on this for a while. Sure. And you're right, it's hard. You have a lot more in the portfolio to bring together than just a single hypervisor, a single storage product. At the same time, though, you were late to market. So the question is, will those capabilities offset that time to market disadvantage? Okay, so one thing, I don't think we're late, but I think from a marking position, we got a little out of the market. You're saying you're not late because it's a still tiny market today, right? Oh, no, no, so if our BladeCenter foundation for cloud, which is what we put forward, is exactly, B-Block, it's integrated systems, VMware, network, management, and storage. Now, we probably didn't do the best getting the news out, but also that was kind of a me too. And IBM was working the background, the real solution, which came out. So I agree that- So you didn't want to make a lot of noise about- Well, I think we failed to make noise. Okay, you feel like maybe in retrospect, you had an opportunity there. But the key thing is we had it for our clients that needed it, but I'll tell you, Pureflex is a step above what you can get from the industry. You made a lot of noise about that. Yes. And I think clients are raving. I'll tell you, every time I talk about it, you ask a question running multiple hypervisors and how many people have VMware or everyone raised their hand and then you ask, well, how many people run only VMware? And it's like, you know, crickets. And this allows you to bring your environment together, physical and virtual. And I'll tell you, that's a big play. So when you talk about cloud, that's a good example of IBM coming together to solve a big challenge that no one else can do. And we've heard from the customers that are coming in from different vectors now, to IBM from business line managers versus IT, we're storage sales guys who would go in, they've got storage speeds and feeds and so on. So that's good news. Yeah, I agree. The question I have for you now in the portfolio is much more of a roadmap question. Sure. You were around theCUBE a day talking about Flash, talking about moving and software being enabled and moving across tiers and having all those cool features. But with Flash and with Fusion IO, with Violin, there's different philosophies of where Flash sits. You know, depending upon who you talk to, it's, I want it to server card, I want it to network, I want it to the app. And data retention is the number one issue right now, latency, retention. So these new architectures are coming up. How does it affect your vision and view of the portfolio? So our vision is very clear. Flash is going to be everywhere. It's going to be simultaneously in every tier of the architectures. It's going to be in servers, PCI, Flash cards. You mentioned a bunch of them. A bunch of vendors. It's going to be in the network as a tier zero Flash only device sitting on the sand or on the IP network. And it's going to be in all the storage arrays that are in multiple doing caching. The key thing is a software to do the coordination optimization of that. So, give me an example. One is efficiency. If you have Flash up at the server, which bring in the IO close to the CPU, it's really fast, but if that server fails over, you need to have efficiency. You don't want to be caching in the server, the network in the storage, but also it's a data integrity issue. You need this coordination software across these different domains. So, for instance, if that VM is using that local cash card called Fusion IO, LSI, Intel, we use them all. If that VM fails over to another system, either by an outage or from vMotion, how do you make sure you don't have a data integrity issue on the other side, right? Stale, read, write. It's that coordination across the different levels across servers that IBM's actually very strong in. And that's what we're demoing today. So, other clients are talking about, in fact, I think EMC's have us from messaging, for sure, but when you look at our portfolio and flash optimization there in our direction, we see the same opportunity, but we're actually in better position. So, for instance, flash cards, EMC comes out with their own proprietary flash card. We'll let you use any vendors you already have. In fact, in our portfolio, Intel, LSI, Micron, Fusion IO, you use what you want. We're not going to build another one. That seems kind of strange, isn't it? In the storage, all of our product line are flash optimized. You put Saucy disk, industry standard Saucy disk, and we'll do the automatic optimization environment. And we announced today a tier zero array that sits in the network. It's called our sexy term, Ultra SSD Drawer. That, listen, you see EMC applying Extreme IO. This blows away Extreme IO and we developed it internally. It's a 1U, 12 terabyte SSD device. It goes 650 isos per second. That's compared to an Extreme IO that's not in production. Half that capacity, half the performance. And you're going to see us drive this. So when you look at what we have in the live demo we did as far as the coordination, again, for efficiency, across the domains, but also for failover. So you get all the benefits of having the different layers. And again, we're not going to pigeon you holding a one particular solution because I think the different solutions are there. The vendors are driving it. We're going to leverage that aggressiveness. And the key thing for us is we're going to help you coordinate. So I want to ask you, so Dave and I have been talking about this four horsemen of disruption in the IT world. Four horsemen. Four horsemen. Four horsemen, you know. Dave loves the horses on the track. Courses for horses, horses for horses, you know. His expression. But really, the four horsemen in cloud, which is the IT transformation, mobile, which is the consumerization of IT, social, which is real-time analytics, the need for speed, and then big data, the transformation aspect. Could you just go through there and see, does that hit your portfolio objectives, those four areas, and of those, cloud, mobile, social, and big data? Talk a little bit about those four things quickly. So it fits in all of them, but let's take cloud first. I mentioned the one example of private clouds, and that would be PureFlux. But also file clouds, which are more public clouds, which are very nascent business, actually, but we're getting traction. You see announcements today, and announcements in December of this year, that bring that full force. So if you want to build a private EC2 in your own data center, you're going to be able to do that on any of our file-based products. But again, in cloud, I think we're a very strong offering, especially with PureFlux in it. Analytics, big data. Because we're an investment on the software side, the actual applications, we're really tied together. Now, some of the solutions, we can do analytics, which is all about flash, getting performance quickly to the IOs. A lot of these are flash resident systems, but memory, resident databases, flash is a natural extension of that. And you're seeing us do that things with SAP HANA, et cetera. That's how we participate, but also in the big data like Hadoop. We don't have it as a storage offering, but IBM has one of the best Hadoop offerings in the industry, it's called Big Insights. It's actually sold and brought to clients by our analytic team. Now why is that? Because when people are looking to deploy big data in Hadoop, they need help finding out what software, how do you get those insights. It's not just dropping off hardware and having them, hey, listen, I'm a storage guy. Here's a bunch of Hadoop stuff. It's actually helping you do that. And IBM is fully equipped with that on applications and services, and we're able to deliver that. So the big data analytics, we're best positioned in the industry to do exactly that. And what you're seeing in products today in market. You mentioned the, well, I put analytics and big data together, so I put two horsemen together. The other one is mobile. That's all about performance, that's all about scale and also cost effectiveness. And if we build out the infrastructure further, so we enable people to do cost effective mobile application and consumerization. And we're driving that. We're at most our values now in software, less and less in proprietary hardware. Like for instance, the Flash I mentioned, we don't build a separate PCI card, it's already available in the market space, leverage that and leverage that innovation. So I actually think we're pretty well aligned across the four horsemen. I actually like that, I'm going to steal that. Ed, talk a little bit about the last question, actually, we're running out of time here. Some of the futures, IBM is pretty disciplined in what it tells people about the future, but what are you telling your customers about, what to look for down the road? And you show us a little leg here. Yes, I think we can. So we're actually making statements of directions currently, and I can share a little bit more past that, but statement of direction that we're making today of what we're going to do in the next nine to 18 months. It's a lot of enhancements around Flash, and we're doing live demos of what I just talked about, the coordination for both efficiency but also resiliency across the different Flash tiers. We're doing live demos of that today at Edge, and you're going to see that come out later this year, this calendar. So distributed sort of Flash coherent. Flash is everywhere, we'll help you do that, but we're not going to pigeonhole you some proprietary, but we're going to help you across the servers, the network and the storage, but have the coordination software, which is really the value for clients. So that's one, that same Flash conversation plays into analytics. You're also just going to see the big data the way we're approaching big data is to leverage our capabilities to help people, well, leverage big data. It's not just the hardware guys, it's how do you bring the whole idea together and walk clients through it, how to get insights, how to do things, and that's what we're doing. So actually our software team and our service team are the ones that bring in the hardware, it's called Big Insights, is our Hadoop cluster. So I think those are the things, so Big Data and Cloud are clearly there. Is the Big Insights at the analytics or just a Hadoop package? So that is just Hadoop. So imagine just Intel, internal storage, Hadoop cluster, fully integrated, come from IBM, and that is sold by a software team, regardless of what analytic application you're using. What's the key analytics package that you guys sell, platform? Well, it's actually the portfolio's pretty broad. So I'm probably. That's the software group, though. Correct. Okay, got it, okay. All right, Ed Walsh, thanks very much. Thank you. I appreciate you taking time out of your busy schedule. I know you're running around, giving keynotes, meeting with customers, so it's always great to see you. Always a pleasure. Thank you. Ed Walsh. We'll be right back with the next guest on theCUBE after this break. I want to thank IBM for allowing us to come to this as independent media. So watch their commercials, watch their videos, and support IBM, and we'll bring you more CUBE action here live in Orlando from SiliconANGLE and Wikibon right after this break. Thank you.